Comment by pcurve
10 days ago
Screens are getting bigger and bigger, yet they make things smaller and harder to click on.
Back in the days when it was common for Macintosh to have 640x480 screens (or even smaller), they still fully visible window controls that were impossible to miss.
https://erichelgeson.github.io/blog/2021/03/23/ultimate-syst...
>Screens are getting bigger and bigger, yet they make things smaller and harder to click on.
And despite things being smaller, there's also white space everywhere so there is less information on your screen.
The trend in UIs is making filenames into discrete icons instead of lists. In outlook this morning all I got 3 attachments and it's 3 icons that all are something almost identical like "<word icon>2026-02-13_A....docx" and I have to hover over them to figure out each filename. I don't get it.
I'm a Solidworks user. It's a 3D CAD program. From about 2012 to 2018, it was unusable with a display higher than 1080p because it did its own bad scaling of UI. Text elements would overlap and be cut off. Since then it works in general but to make 2D drawings I still change to 1080p. Making drawings involves a lot of clicking on lines and vertexes to add dimensions, but the hitboxes are 1 dimension thick, or even 1 single pixel. It's maddening at 4K. There are selection filters that help, but since it's sluggish in general in 4K I just admit defeat and use 1080p.
I launched spotify on my phone today and it had a grid of playlists I could chose from. The grid showed a maximum of 6 characters per playlist over two lines, but there was certainly a lot of whitespace available, and some random album art that told me nothing.
It was basically unusable, but I'm sure some designer thought it was slick.
Screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ii0xb6fcnexdfpdudayj1/2026-02...
I had a new one yesterday. In Apple Music (iPhone), you can long hold on a song or album and press "add to playlist" and then select the playlist. The next action you probably want to do is long hold on another album and tap "add to playlist". You have to wait 2 seconds to do this because a pop-up that says "x added to playlist" appears in the exact location you need to click on. It not only obscures the area, it prevents a tap from registering.
That’s actually unreal. You’d think with all the money they steal from artists they could afford UX that isn’t hilariously bad.
this is hilariously, almost unbelievably bad
I’ve been a mac user since 1994, system 7, and it feels to me like the overall Mac user experience and reliability (stability, speed, etc) really peaked with Snow Leopard, 10.6.
This probably has a lot to do with the vastly improved hardware design around then - the touchpad specifically on the “blackbook” Core 2 Duo era macbooks was a step change, and they keyboard was pretty great too. Multi-monitor support was fantastic compared to everything else too.
You have to wonder what the design principles of pre-X MacOS paired with modern Apple hardware could achieve.
I'm sorry guys, it's my fault.
My first mac was a 09 MBP with snow leopard, shortly after they updated and started removing random features and closing down customization. For some reason, you couldn't be trusted with more than one right click method anymore.
A solid 15 years later I try macs again, had a nice m3 air at work and bought a personal M4 air. A few months later Tahoe comes out. I bought the thing because modern darkmode macos looked so great and was such a pleasure to use. Now it's full on bubbleboy.
Word must have gotten back to Cupertino that I was back in the ecosystem...
>...really peaked with Snow Leopard, 10.6.
Which was just a couple of years after the iPhone. After the iPhone, the Mac was the new Apple ][, i.e. something they kept around to make some money, but didn't really care about.
I have the feeling the regions are the same since the EGA's 620x200 (and hercules mode!) days of windows 3.x for almost all operating systems. Some window managers have updated it a bit but if you look at the increase in pixel density (640x480 on a 14" crt is 57ish ppi, and that is being very generous, vs my home display of 110ppi and the retina displays with 200+ ppi) I get the idea the regions have stayed the same in pixel size despite display scaling and such.
Or we all go (back) to tiling window managers and get rid of all the resizing with the press of a key, or even no press.
> Screens are getting bigger and bigger, yet they make things smaller and harder to click on.
Totally true. I have some some UX designers daily driving 4k monitors with 2k resolution to see things clearly!!